This article contends that an important driver of turnout is the national stories embraced by citizens. We suggest the notion of 'story incentive,' whereby adopting a group's story components – those that connect the past, the future, and prominent national characters – motivates individuals to participate in that group's political activities. Leaning on narrative theories and studies on voter turnout, we develop and test hypotheses regarding the effect of story components on the likelihood of voting. Our measurements of story incentives are based on election surveys and encompass Denmark, Israel, the Netherlands, the UK, and the US. The results support the main story-incentive hypothesis. We discuss the theoretical ramifications of the connection between adherence to national stories and voter turnout. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Our aim is to propose guidelines for the analysis of political personalization and personalized politics in general and for behavioural personalization in particular. The first guideline is based on our understanding that personalization comes at the cost of party politics. It suggests that in order to classify politics as more or less personalized, we must compare it to an alternative party-oriented politics. Based on a synthesis of existing theoretical work, the second guideline suggests three analytical dimensions to clarify the multidimensional concept of personalization: arena, level and character. Arena refers to where personalization takes place; level refers to whose power or independence is changing; and character refers to how personalization is manifested. Furthermore, we present the contributions of this symposium and explain how they follow the two guidelines and advance our understanding and knowledge of behavioural political personalization. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Policy scholars tend to view disproportionate policy and its two component concepts – policy over- and underreaction – as either unintentional errors of commission or omission, or nonintentional responses that political executives never intended to implement yet are not executed unknowingly, inadvertently or accidentally. This article highlights a conceptual turn, whereby these concepts are reentering the policy lexicon as types of intentional policy responses that are largely undertaken when political executives are vulnerable to voters. Intentional overreactions derive from the desire of political executives to pander to voters' opinions or signal extremity by overreacting to these opinions in domains susceptible to manipulation for credit-claiming purposes. Intentional underreactions are motivated by political executives' attempts to avoid blame and may subsequently lead to deliberate overreaction. This conceptual turn forces scholars to recognise the political benefits that electe

2020 NOV 20 (NewsRx) – By a News Reporter-Staff News Editor at Science Letter – According to news reporting based on a preprint abstract, our journalists obtained the following quote [...]

המטרה: לבחון את מהות ויסות הרגש הקבוצתי. עיקרי הדברים: המאמר סוקר מחקרים העוסקים בויסות רגש קבוצתי, המהווה נושא פסיכולוגי שקיבל תשומת לב מחקרית הולכת וגוברת בשנים האחרונות. זאת, תוך התמקדות בתפקיד המוטיבציה בויסות הרגש והבחנה בין גורמי הנעה שונים בהקשר הקולקטיבי. הסקירה מגדירה תחילה מהו ויסות רגש קבוצתי. בהמשך, נדונים שלושה סוגים שלמוטיבציות קבוצתיות: מוטיבציות הנובעות מיחסים תוך-קבוצתיים הקשורים בשאלה מה רצוי ביחסים בקבוצה; מוטיבציות בין-קבוצתיות הנוגעות למה רצוי ביחסים עם הקבוצה השנייה; ומוטיבציות מטה-קבוצתיות העוסקות באופי הרצוי של הקבוצה. המאמר מסכם בדיון על השלכות תוכנו הן לתחום המחקרי והן לתחום המעשי. הסבר מושג: רגש קבוצתי – תחושות הפרט הנובעות מהשתייכותו או הזדהותו לקבוצה מסויימת.

This article describes the efforts made by the Israeli government to contain the spread of COVID-19, which were implemented amidst a constitutional crisis and a yearlong electoral impasse, under the leadership of Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu, who was awaiting a trial for charges of fraud, bribery, and breach of trust. It thereafter draws on the disproportionate policy perspective to ascertain the ideas and sensitivities that placed key policy responses on trajectories which prioritized differential policy responses over general, nation-wide solutions (and vice versa), even though data in the public domain supported the selection of opposing policy solutions on epidemiological or social welfare grounds. The article also gauges the consequences and implications of the policy choices made in the fight against COVID-19 for the disproportionate policy perspective. It argues that Prime Minister Netanyahu employed disproportionate policy responses both at the rhetorical level and on the

This article seeks to improve our understanding of what policy over- and under-design mean; what are the consequences of these suboptimal designs; and how politics matters to these designs. Based on the review of the literature and a variety of examples that focus on the role of information quality in policy design, and drawing on two phenomena from the field of epidemiology (namely, over-adjustment and unnecessary adjustment), the article enhances the definitional clarity of the terms under investigation and allows us to address the difficulty in reconciling technical problem solving with politics. The article proposes new definitional statements of proportionate and disproportionate policy designs that vary according to the extent to which the main design properties are adjusted to low-quality information. It also explores distinct variations in a few policy characteristics resulting from over- and under-design. The policy characteristics examined here include economic efficiency, p

המטרה: לבחון את השפעותיהן הפוליטיות של משברים. עיקרי הדברים: המאמר חוקר את מקומה של המדיניות ביצירתם והגברתם של משברים למטרות רווח פוליטי. זאת, תוך התמקדות בסגנונות שונים של עיצוב מדיניות מוגזמת לטיפול במשברים המלאכותיים והשפעותיהם על הבוחר הפוטנציאלי. המאמר מגדיר תחילה מהי מדיניות מוגזמת ומופרזת ומסביר על מניעיה האסטרטגיים השונים בכלל ובזיקה לרצון לחולל משברים מלאכותיים בפרט, תוך הדגמתם במקרים שונים מן הפוליטיקה העולמית, כדוגמת תגובתו של ראש הממשלה בנימין נתניהו למשבר התפרצות נגיף הקורונה Covid-19. בהמשך, ובמטרה להמחיש את הקשר שבין מדיניות מוגזמת ומשברים מלאכותיים, מוצע ניתוח לאופן ניהולו של נשיא ארצות הברית דונלד טרמפ את משבר שיירות ההגירה מאמריקה הלטינית בשנת 2018. ניתוח זה נערך לאורם של שלושה סגנונות עיצוב מדיניות מוגזמת: שימוש בתקשורת מוחלטת על מנת לשלוט על הנרטיב והשיח בציבור; חקיקת חוקים נוקשים שאינם מותירים שיקול דעת לרשויות האכיפה; ואתגור וערעור שלטון החוק. המאמר שופך אור על ההשפעות ההדדיות של הפוליטיקה ואופן ניהולם של משברים והוא מצביע על ההשלכות הטמונות בהשפעו

Studies of policy bubbles have so far ignored the possibility that a policy bubble in a given policy domain or jurisdiction may constitute an information event for another policy bubble that has been inflated elsewhere. In addition, studies of policy diffusion have paid little attention to the transmission of imperfect and wrongful policy valuations through social networks. To bridge these gaps, this article develops a theoretical framework and methodological toolbox for explaining the potential impact of interbubble dynamics on the sustainment of policy bubbles. This is achieved by focusing on: (i) the diffusion of interbubble connectivity information through social networks characterized by varying levels of segregation; (ii) the perceptions of distorted or corrected information by individuals at the receiving end as being factual, thus requiring no gap-filling by policy actors, or as an opinion that therefore requires gap-filling; (iii) the derived consequence in terms of simple or

Abstract This article develops a strategic agenda concerning regulatory agencies' strategic communication in light of the reputation literature. It highlights the main strands in this literature, presents the fundamental findings discovered so far, responds to the critiques that have recently surfaced, and offers guidance about where scholarship on strategic communication might most profitably head. The critiques discussed here centre on two aspects: (i) the claim that an agency's communication choices are to some extent driven by the distinctive logic of the media rather than by reputational concerns, and (ii) the argument that strategic communication provides only short-term solutions to emerging threats and is therefore overemphasized in the literature. Future agendas include, for example, the selection of audience segmentation strategies, and the management of competing and even contradictory communication for segmented audiences when agencies enjoy exclusive jurisdiction, as oppo

The scholarship on republicanism has moved away from perfectionist and communitarian to neo-Roman interpretations of the tradition, but the scholarship on citizenship in Israel has taken a different turn: republican citizenship has come to be identified with an unusual, ethnicized conception of it, sometimes described as 'ethnorepublicanism'. This article critically discusses the ethnicization of the concept of republican citizenship in Israel Studies. The first part reconstructs how the concept of ethnorepublican citizenship, originally used to criticize the unequal status of Palestinian citizens in Israel, has morphed into an ideological justification of unequal citizenship. The second part argues that ethnorepublicanism rejects the republican commitment to the equal liberty of citizens and thus constitutes a perverse form of republicanism. The development of Israeli ethnorepublicanism illustrates the worrying potential of republican citizenship to be integrated into agendas of excl

Located in the theoretical triangle of urban, cultural, and political studies, this paper examines artists’ political engagement in cities. Applying a qualitative approach through inter-urban fieldwork in Hamburg and Hanover, Germany, and Jerusalem and Tel Aviv-Jaffa, Israel, we study how artists critically engage with their cities and urban spaces, and analyze how the artists’ themselves perceive and practice their own actions. Based on this, we offer a typology of artists’ attitudes and behavior patterns toward urban politics and policies, which we propose as a relevant theoretical tool for analyzing political engagement of artists in the urban environment. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]